Hotel Rwanda

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Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the manager of a Kigali luxury hotel, with his wife, played by Sophie Okonedo, centre.Photo: PA

(M) General release

****

Nick Nolte and Joaquin Phoenix are among the cast of Hotel
Rwanda and it is tempting to wonder if, a few years ago, they
might have been its stars: Nolte, as a hapless UN officer unable to
deploy his troops to save lives, or Phoenix, as a seasoned war
photographer.

But the main figure in this film - played by American actor Don
Cheadle, admittedly - is not a European nor an American. Director
Terry George and his co-writer Keir Pearson, have focused on the
real-life experience of a Rwandan: Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel
manager in charge of an upmarket hotel in Kigali, part of a chain
of Belgian establishments.

He's a capable, assured, intuitive character, committed to a
smoothly run, professional operation. He exercises authority
judiciously. He knows how to keep on the good side of the military,
with a timely bottle or two of whisky or a Cuban cigar; how to use
contacts of all kinds to maintain the business, keep his hotel
stocked and stay out of trouble.

But we are aware, right from the outset, of tensions building
around him: the film opens with the sound of a radio broadcast that
many viewers will register, and others will soon recognise as a
rallying device for Tutsi forces planning a massacre.

At his hotel, journalists gather; the military holds briefings;
UN troops and aid workers are in evidence. George and Pearson
briskly establish a context for the division into Hutu and Tutsi in
Rwanda: a distinction, we are told, created by Belgian colonists
who favoured the Tutsi.

Paul is a Hutu: his wife (Sophie Okonedo) is Tutsi, as are
several family members, friends, and employees. He is given a Hutu
Pride shirt by one of his contacts, and accepts it, without
thinking much about it, although he's aware that it might be useful
to him. Accustomed to knowing how the world works, and making it
work for him, he isn't able to grasp what it is actually happening
until it is almost too late.

Gradually, Paul's understanding of his role is transformed. He
will do what he knows best, but all his management skills, his
savoir faire, negotiating gifts, his ability to cut deals and call
in favours will be used to keep Hutu militia at bay. The Mille
Collines will continue to function, and he will continue to act as
its manager: but it will become, somehow, a refuge for Tutsi (and
sometimes Hutu) fleeing from the machetes of the militia. He
trusts, still, in the goodwill of the West. He believes that his
activities will be temporary, and that rescue is on its way. And
once again, he doesn't immediately grasp what is happening: the
West and the people he has catered to are abandoning Rwanda.

George allows this indictment of the West to stand,
emphatically. But in choosing to place the story of one man and his
resistance at the centre of the film, he risks underplaying the
horror, and risks making genocide a backdrop to a positive
story.

He has also chosen a degree of restraint in the way he depicts
the massacres and executions, and again, some might consider this
undercuts the impact of the film.

But although much of the movie takes place in the hotel, there
is always the sense of the world beyond it, an awareness of those
who have not found refuge there (and, in the final stages of the
film, how roles can be reversed, how armies of killers can become
people in flight).

There is no shortage of harrowing moments - landscapes of
bodies, glimpses of hair-trigger violence, the rhetoric of
destruction on the radio, a memorable scene in which it gradually
dawns on Paul, on the road looking for supplies, that his car has
become literally bogged down in corpses.

In the midst of this horror, Cheadle's performance is quick,
vivid and utterly involving: it is a portrait of a man who drives
himself to do what he does best, even as his disillusionment with
the basis on which he lived his life is manifestly clear.

He becomes an increasingly desperate improviser, his frantic ad
libs keeping pace with the madness around him.

There are occasions when he is overwhelmed - when, for example,
in a terrible, comic scene of despair, the act of tying a tie and
assuming his professional persona becomes suddenly impossible. Or
when he folds in a moment of grief, then straighten himself and
continues.

Cheadle has an Oscar nomination for best actor. But this isn't a
grandstanding portrayal: it is a performance at the service of the
work.

George - an Irish filmmaker whose writing credits include In
the Name of the Father and Hart's War, and whose
directing debut was Some Mother's Son - set out to make a
moving film aimed at a mainstream audience, a story with an
emotional charge that is also a challenge to its viewers.